Fischer thumps Arafat's table to demand peace

By Tom Gross from Jerusalem

12:00AM BST 10 Jun 2001

HOURS after last weekend's suicide bombing at a Tel Aviv nightclub, Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, stormed into the West Bank headquarters of Yasser Arafat, banged his hand on the table and demanded that the Palestinian leader order an immediate ceasefire.

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At about the same time, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt telephoned Mr Arafat, imploring him to call a halt to the violence. His appeal had been prompted by a report from Ihab el Sharif, Cairo's chargé d'affaires in Tel Aviv, who had witnessed the bombing, which killed 21 young Israelis.

Mr Fischer explained on Israeli television last week how he came to be involved. "After all, I was there," he said in a voice shaking with emotion. "Three hours before the terror attack, I was jogging along the beachfront past the place where it occurred. I ran to Jaffa and back to my hotel.

"The first image that went through my mind when the bomb went off was of my two children - 17 and 22 years old - who go out to discotheques on Friday nights like the young people do in Tel Aviv and all around the world."

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Mr Fischer, who prolonged his official visit to Israel by several days to act as a peace-broker, said he went to see Mr Arafat in Ramallah after the bomb and "banged my hand on the desk to demonstrate the seriousness of the situation".

He told Mr Arafat that he had to act immediately if he was interested in bringing "any kind of peace to the Palestinian people" and that his actions had to constitute "deeds - not just words".

The next day Mr Arafat went on television to condemn an act of violence for the first time since the Palestinians launched their latest uprising last September. Mr Fischer said he personally redrafted the wording of Mr Arafat's ceasefire demand to weed out any ambiguity.

The German minister liaised with Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, and flew to see Mr Mubarak in Cairo before returning to meet Mr Arafat again in Ramallah last week.

Israel has welcomed the German role and sees Germany as one of the few European countries to have taken a relatively balanced stand on the Middle East conflict. This, said Mr Fischer, was partly because "we have a special responsibility towards Israel based on our tragic history, and therefore we have listened to the Israeli side of things, too".

Mr Sharif said he had been at a seaside restaurant near the bombed nightclub when the atrocity took place. He said: "I saw ambulances racing to the scene, together with desperate parents looking for their children. I relayed my feelings back to Cairo." He said Mr Mubarak had spoken to Mr Arafat by phone every day last week to make sure he kept his vow to maintain a ceasefire.

Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire on May 22, followed by Mr Arafat's own pledge last weekend. However, many Israelis fear that the fragile truce will not last. Although there has been a significant drop in the number of shootings, bombings and mortar raids on Israelis over the past week, attacks are still continuing at a rate of about five a day.

An Israeli army officer with links to the intelligence services said: "The number of shooting incidents often drops after a major terror attack, as leading terrorists go underground for fear of an Israeli reprisal. Arafat has yet to re-arrest a single one of the convicted terrorists he released from jails last year. All the evidence suggests that his talk of a ceasefire is purely a short-term tactical manoeuvre."